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Cal Newport

I recently caught up with my friend, Cal Newport, who is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. Cal is the author of three books of unconventional advice for students, including How to Be a High School Superstar (Random House, 2010), How to Become a Straight-A Student (Random House, 2006), and How to Win at College (Random House, 2005). His fourth book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, is a contrarian look at career advice that was just recently published. His Study Hacks blog, which chronicles his attempts to decode "patterns of success," attracts over 100,000 unique visitors a month. In this interview, Cal talks about why you shouldn't follow your passion, how to master a skill, how to handle a job you hate, and more.

A lot of people say that you should follow your passion to have a successful career. What are your thoughts on that?

I think "follow your passion" is terrible advice. Most people don't have preexisting passions that can be easily matched to their work. And for those who do enjoy such passion, there's little evidence that building a career around it will lead to satisfaction. If you want to love what you do for a living, what does seem to matter is to have traits such as autonomy, impact, recognition, creativity. These traits are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer instead. In other words, if you want to love what you do, first focus on becoming exceptional at a rare and valuable skill, then leverage this value to gain the types of traits mentioned above. This strategy has very little to do with matching your job to some mythical, hard-wired passion.

What steps should a young professional take to get good at a skill? How do they figure out what skills are important?

To discover what skills are important in a field, study its stars. Ignore the subjective descriptions of their intelligence or work ethic, and instead identify the specific things they know how to do that are rare and valuable to the organization. Once you have a skill in mind, take practice tips from athletes or musicians. They know how to build a focused practice routine that develops your skills in targeted ways.

Why do you think that what people do for a living isn't as important as how they do it?

Above, I talked about the traits that seem to lead to people loving their work. These traits are agnostic to specific fields. You can have autonomy, for example, or impact, in any number of fields.

You interviewed a lot of people in your book. What was the most interesting one and why?

They were all interesting in their own way. Take, for example Ryan Voiland, who was this young guy who runs a successful organic farm with his wife. The idea of dropping everything to go buy some farmland is a well-trod day dream of the cubicle class. When you hear Ryan's story, however, you discover that he spent years and years honing his skill as a grower, including four years studying horticulture at Cornell, before he made the move into full-time farming. In other words, even the most idyllic career success stories require that you first get really good at something rare and valuable. If Ryan had just decided one day that he was "passionate" about farming and then bought some farmland, he would have almost certainly failed. He needed to get really good at horticulture before he could make a successful, happy career from farming.

What do you recommend to people who work at major companies and hate their jobs?

Here's my formula. The first step to a working life you love is figuring out what general traits resonate with you. Do seek simplicity in life? Do you seek power and influence? Notice, these traits are way more general then specific industries. Next, ask yourself how you can build up enough rare and valuable skills that you'll have enough leverage to gain these traits. Think carefully about whether this is possible in your current job. If you're sure it's not, then switch to a position in which skill is more rewarded. The final step is to systematically build this skill like an athlete training for the Olympics.

This is hard work. But it's satisfying. Especially as you begin to see your leverage within your organization grow, and you begin using this leverage to gain the traits that matter to you -- all the while your co-workers, clutching their battered copies of "What Should I Do With My Life?", stare anxiously out the office window, wondering if they should buy a farm.

Dan Schawbel is a Gen Y career expert and the founder of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and consulting company. He is also the #1 international bestselling author of Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future and was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 list in 2010. Subscribe to his Personal Branding Blog for more self-help advice.